Blake Butler - Three Hundred Million - A Novel

I watched without having to see or take part or understand it. I did not hold your hand .

I stood beside you in the light and watched you die and then I watched you die again .

The manner of your death may have pretended it was something. Cancer, or pneumonia .

But it was me. Your death was me. It was your mom and dad. It was you, too. It was us .

Your death lives on in every element of the face of the real. As does every other death .

All one mind sunning and stuffed full with all the other memories of all the others held .

Your body changed colors once you had left it. It was burned or buried full of its ideas .

I walked around inside your home. Your rooms without you seem much larger .

I have touched your photo on the face. Any and all of our faces. The long white hours .

Soon any grace will be destroyed. Was there something you wanted to save from there .

Was there a thing you meant to keep. A word a mode a box a day a wish a mesh of arms .

The singing all throughout your sternum as your body turned to sod inside the ground .

What does it smell like. My dead body.

It smells like molding trees. Or like some apples in a big sun. It smells bad.

Do you wish there weren’t any smell at all to smell of me forever.

I don’t know what I wish.

Try and think of it.

I can’t. It splits open. It comes apart.

Try harder, fuckface. And keep trying. There is definitely a try. There is definitely a window.

B.: My name is B. Or at least that’s the name Flood has given you to know me by, though it’s not really my name. I have had a lot of names, it feels like. I don’t remember any of them. The name is not important. Flood’s name’s not Flood. Your name’s not really your name either, and so on. There are people, and there are minds, and in the minds there are corridors and glue and other people. There are unique locations on the earth, accessible only through certain openings available only for short periods of time while the locations are available and can be opened into the other locations. This is the system of the world. The temporary doors to the unique locations are carried in our bodies, in thoughts. They are carried in moments and forms and quickly disappearing spaces. I am speaking to you from one of those locations. Please don’t tell him that I have. He thinks he is the only one who can speak outside the speaking in the space beyond the tape, though he is not. He thinks the thoughts he has inside these boxes are not recorded and repeated though they are recorded and repeated, too. There are many tapes, each one believing that the matter they contain is theirs, and that the space beyond them has been disrupted in their absence, or otherwise compromised or damaged or even totally destroyed. Where you were is where you are. But none of this is what I meant to come to tell you. I wanted you to know that everything that has been said up to this point is real. The murders, the boys and bodies, the investigation, the moving from one shape to the next, the other detectives’ thinking: all of this is what was done. And is still being done. Any distortions in the story are the story. It is around you, in the hour of your day. It may seem this is a book that you are reading, and when you close it what it contains is put away. It is not like that. There is a force who moves among our bodies, coming through your holes into the world and slowly knitting. It will be the ending of us all, in a form beyond simply a body. This is not necessarily a bad thing. You are surrounded by mirrors. You make the world out of your mind. The same is true of those you love. You are not dead and you will never be and you are dead and you are not alive and you’re alive and you will never be .

So, like, into the light. The endless daylight. There was a beginning and end, but each day again the beginning began again and the end ended again and nothing changed and nothing grew into anything beyond the tape, which was what I’d always been. The captured colors of the people clasped around me without scent or warmth, nothing to hold still against and listen, no music beyond the other tapes that all seemed blank. I could not think of the name for anything even as I remembered how to use it. There seemed no reason, or concept of reason. When I slept, hoping to wake up anywhere beyond here, I did not dream, or the dreams were just of wide black walls dividing me from everything else ever. After lying down it would be so hard to get back up, my joints and blood so stiff it was as if I’d become part of the surface I’d lain down on. But soon always each stretch of film proved it did not need me and let me always continue going. Each thing that felt new was something I’d already touched and tried to remember that I had and had failed to remember.

The buildings sprawled and held and continued being exactly what they were. Even as far as the world went there seemed spaces I was not meant to be undertaken by. Mostly these were always all the homes. At the mouth of any house where someone had lived a life, I would begin shaking. I’d shake so hard I couldn’t feel my blood, like it was falling out from inside me into deeper crevices divorced from eternity. The vibration in me building false heat would coil so hot and thick I would fall down on the earth sometimes and not be able to get up then for even longer than I knew. All throughout the shaking the video did anything it wanted. It seemed like when I was no longer able to take part in it, the world around me was full of everything I’d always wished. I mean that when I couldn’t look or do anything else about it, I could hear people laughing and being alive then. I could feel them at the edges of me asking if I was okay or needed help. I couldn’t see their forms but I could feel it all, all over.

Each time I rose again there was no one there. This of course again redoubled in me the feeling of wanting to find someone inside the tape, even knowing I’d suffered some latent mirage of purpose. The longer I looked for others and could not find them, or was at least not allowed to feel I had really, the smaller the air seemed somehow, which worked backwards from how I would have expected. There was only me among them breathing, being precisely the thing they weren’t.

Throughout it all I felt that hovered presence in my head, beyond even just my thinking; it was more a kind of perverted area wanting something to attach to, a remainder of what life had been once, if only to provide context for its wired content, my memory; otherwise all that I had been just seemed a sprawl of ongoing minor wrecks, a mass of blackness like the dreamworlds where there wasn’t even the idea of something like our land.

And yet nothing new about the hours came forth on their own besides where sometimes the tape would hiss suddenly with static, interrupting the true lines of the supposed real. Glitches would appear or buzz out of the pixels. Whole big lightning-like strikes of wavering would lurch out through the horizontal beams of day. During these times I’d get down on both my knees and beg the buzzing not to stop but to move into me, too, to wrap me over, and it never would. Always the buzzing and razing only hit the land and fuzzed it out into a world less like myself. Sometimes it would obscure my skin a bit or pull my face apart but I could still feel me going on exactly the same, just in different temporary costume.

Anyway, there was no one to tell me what seemed new from the outside, how they couldn’t discern me now from what I’d been just before, or even where the land was and I wasn’t. And yet thereafter when I could see again and could stand again and began to walk among more space, I knew there was something lost about me I might remember sometime that there had been something there before at least, something rolled and wet about the homes and people missing from them and my body and my arms and mouth and face and hair, and even if I never remembered what it was, even in feeling nothing knowing nothing seeming nothing, there was still this little glimmer about the possibility of any instant coming apart from what it was. Where the replicating light inside the tape struck and stuck itself against me over and over I could feel inside the warming flesh there an alternating wish for light, a thing pulling or being pulled or wanting for wanting or knowing the want for want had once been there within the idea of me. Whether this made the hours that much harder or warmer going forward in the hours on hours I have no idea and do not wish to, so if you know please do not say. I wouldn’t hear you anyway, regardless, could I, but there is the shaking of the knowledge of the never-sent response, from which some nights there falls the language of the whole, to which every instant in every body has been appended, regardless of what luck.